Sunday, May 21, 2017

Donald Trump's Flying Circus: Westworld

During the Trump transition, Saturday Night Live had a brilliant skit that treated the whole thing as an episode of Westworld. Anderson Cooper and a team of analysts, one Trump supporters and the rest opposed,* discussed the latest Trump outrages. The response to each successive outrage announce is the same:

"You know what, this is not normal!"
"It's unacceptable!"
"This is crazy!"
"This is where we in the media have to draw the line."
"This isn't like [the previous outrage]. Yeah, fine, whatever, who cares about that. But this is different."
"We cannot let him off the hook this time."
TRUMP SUPPORTER: "Um, can we just remember that most Americans voted for Trump?"
"Actually, they didn't."

These same lines (except for what "this isn't like") are repeated over and over verbatim for each successive outrage, most of them real. The outrages named were Trump seeking security clearance for his children even though they were running his businesses (true), the entire KKK planning a parade to celebrate Trump's win (false, so far as I know), Trump proposing a Muslim registry (true, though never actually done), Trump naming Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist (true), and Trump settling a fraud lawsuit for $25 million dollars (true). As the same script runs over and over, seeming more unreal each time, eventually Anderson Cooper has a strange sense that this has happened before. At this point the screen freezes and some technicians show up to remove the malfunctioning unit and replace him with Jake Tapper.

And that was just the first ten days of the transition! And yet the same thing is still going on, only now with a line or two about whether this will be the final outrage that leads Congressional Republicans to break with him. Congressional Republicans have developed their own Westworld script in which they tut-tut and express concern but nothing further happens. The current joke on Twitter is "Sen. McCain just raised his threat level to 'furrowed brow,' while Sen. Graham has gone from 'concerned' to 'very concerned.'"

Consider the latest outrages from our continuing Westworld script:

Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn determined to be an unregistered Turkish agent who also took money from the Russian government.**

Donald Trump fires Mike Comey, the head of the FBI who was probing connections between Donald Trump and the Russian government.

Donald Trump admits that he fired Comey to stop the investigation.

Comey reveals that Trump asked him to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn and to pledge loyalty to him personally instead of to his duties as law enforcement official.

Trump bluntly tells the Russians that he fired Comey to put an end to the Russia probe.

Michael Flynn turns out to have persuaded the US government to change its military plans to please his Turkish patrons. Oh, yes, and it turns out the transition team knew he was in the pay of the Turkish government when they hired him as National Security Adviser.

And Congressional Republicans are still saying:

"You know what, this is not normal!"
"It's unacceptable!"
"This is crazy!"
"This is where we in the media Congress have to draw the line."
"This isn't like [the previous outrage]. Yeah, fine, whatever, who cares about that. But this is different."
"We cannot let him off the hook this time."

Lather, rinse repeat.

But then again, on the bright side, at least he hasn't shot anyone in the middle of Fifth Avenue (yet). Not that I would expect the reaction to be any different if he did.

And, in all fairness to Trump, at least he never sent State Department e-mails on a private server. We have to focus on what is truly important, after all.
___________________________________*I don't follow the talking heads well enough to recognize all of them, but they are all real people.**Agent in this case does not mean spy. It means a paid lobbyist for a foreign government. So long as such agents register properly, it is perfectly legal, if not highly regarded. But it may not be legal for recently retired military personnel to be foreign agents. It is definitely not legal for current federal employees to be foreign agents. And for a National Security Adviser to be a paid agent of a foreign government was unthinkable until it actually happened.